Year End Review

As the end of 2006 approaches, it is good to review the year. Numerous requests came in after I started advertising using Google adwords. Some of these were interesting and relatively easy to fullfil. Some were looking for other missionaries or agencies to connect with. A surprising number were looking for finances or funding. This could be due to the fact that I focussed on advertising in sub-Saharan Africa. I didn't know what to do with these, except perhaps advise them to start a website and blog so that, if they did email people, these people would have something to look at.

In looking over at how I operate, I wondered about a few things. Should I use a forum to track requests and answers? The advantage of that is that others could more easily provide answers, other than myself. Also, it would give interested people something to look at before they submitted a request. At present, my privacy policy is that I don't share submitted information with any third party.

A forum could be hosted on a free site such as proboards.com, or it could be placed directly on my website. This option would double my yearly cost for the website, which I don't want to do right now. Also, some of those requesting live in creative access countries and wouldn't want their requests, names or emails published. For this reason alone, it is probably best not to use a forum.

The other option would be to put this blog on my website, but since it isn't essential to the operation of the site, it is probably better to keep it off for now.

I've also found that good, active, missions related forums are in short supply. At least there are few that I have been able to find. One I have looked at recently was Emercy's Discussion Board. OSCAR's forum had to shut down due to spam. On the other hand, there are quite a few email based groups. I just did a search of missions related groups registered with Yahoo. The one that struck me was ACFMissions, which had 2018 members.

There is Brigada, which has a weekly mailing and a subscriber list of about 10,000. This seems to be the most active group I have found so far. The Network for Strategic Missions also has quite a number of groups of the email variety. I kind of like the forum approach myself, as various threads can be going on at the same time and the whole thing can be searchable. But for those with slower internet connections, email is definitely the way to go.

That's all for now.